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Chapter 15—ENGLISH PLAIN STYLE AND BIBLE READING, 248-274
Prof. Daniell moves in a side-direction, to wit, to demonstrate the influence of plain speech and plain speaking mediated through Tyndale’s Biblical influences (and the translational progeny).
He raises several issues: (1) 3 influential plain stylists, (2) influences on Tyndale, (3) Magdalen College Vulgaria, (4) Queen Mary, (5) Bible reading, (6) Bible reading by individuals, (7) Bible reading and a national resurgence, and (8) the arrival of English.
English was a “poor thing” spoken on a tiny island “off the shelf of Europe,” a language unknown in Europe and spoken by over 2 million Englanders (compared to our time…2 billion as the first languagers?). Thomas More, the viciously anti-Reformed Anglo-Italian, claimed that 2/3rds could read English in England. This may have been over-stated in order to fan the hostile flames of De Haeretico Comburendo. We know he was given to over-blown and highly exaggerated language, viciously and murderously so. Even one strongly committed Anglo-Italian ass, Nicholas Harpsfield, operating during Elizabeth’s time, felt More was over-the-top. We'll stick with Tyndale's term, "asses."
But, whatever the literacy rate was in England, Prof. Daniell warms to his theme again: “I argue that the switch was thrown” by the English Bible and Tyndale (248). Prof. Daniell appears to like the metaphor of “switch” or “power switch” for a power-line or turning on the lights on a national level.
England alone.
England was alone in not having a vernacular Bible. Prof. Daniell points to these vernacular Bibles from European presses: 1466—Germany, 1471—Italy, 1474—France, 1477—Dutch, 1478—Catalin, and before 1500—Spain and Portugal. These were not for the “swine” (an Anglo-Italian term of art for the laity) or public use, liturgy or homes. Nevertheless, there were 1000 presses in Europe compared to 3 in England—Caxton, de Worde, and Pynsson. These vernaculars were translated from the Latin text and for use by one licensed by an Italian-based senior ass.
Luther’s German Bible in 1522 was based on Erasmus’ 1516 Greek NT. We previously reviewed the stern, murderous and oppressive policy of the Anglo-Italian asses in England: (1) the Parliamentary Act of 1401, De Haeretico Comburendo, (2) the repressive canons of the 1407 Provincial Council of Oxford, and the (3) works of the Ass-bishop of Canterbury, Lord Arundel, with his 11 deadly Constitutions, adopted in Canterbury, York, Lambeth, Oxford and across the nation. It was directed at Wyclif and his poor preachers. England was alone and under the Anglo-Italian thumb.
But, on Prof. Daniell’s reading, “something was happening in the 1520s-1530s internationally, nationally and locally” (250). The printers in Antwerp were all too happy to collect the profits trading off an English appetite. The hunger was for the English Bible—with more print runs than the Aeneid or Iliad.
“Plain style.” Tyndale made efforts to avoid the “colours of rhetoric.” The Bible was for the “mass of ordinary men and women,” not for the “Neoplatonic courtly poets” of Elizabeth’s period (251).
Prof. Daniell offers several examples of the impact.
1. Thomas Hobbes was constantly defending his plain style (253).
2. Addison continually defended this style. He desired this:
“It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables and in Coffee-houses” (253).
3. Samuel Johnson, an advocate of heavily-Latinized English, nevertheless concluded this—negatively but illustratively—about Addison:
“Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison” (253).
4. Bishop John Wilkins, a man with a colorful background, wrote of the need for plain style speech in Ecclesiastes or a Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching, as it falls under the rules of Art:
“…must be plain and natural, not being darkened with the affections of Scholastical harshness or Rhetorical flourishes. Obscurity in the discourse is an argument of ignorance in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness. The more clearly we understand anything ourselves, the more easily can we expound it to others. When the notion itself is good, the best way to set it off is in the most obvious plain expression. St. Paul does often glory in this” (254).
We would add a few logs to this fire: (1) Cornelius Van Til’s densities will largely die with his few enthusiasts. He never learned to write with clarity. (2) Jean Calvin, Martin Luther, Guido de Bres, Zachary Ursinus, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer learned to write with clarity. (3) Hooker "was and is" a thicket so thick as to be virtually in-penetrable. (4) Even Owen, though dense, is understandable. (5) Bishop J.C. Ryle (one of the men we willingly call “Bishop”) observed that many of his colleagues were caught up in the Victorian efforts at rhetorical flourish and flair. As an Eton and Oxford man, he witnessed it. He vowed to do the opposite. The old master of Liverpool is ever-accessible and direct. (6) Or, we would add the Rev. Dr. Prof. Allen C. Gulezo who writes with clarity, wit, scholarship and insight—it communicates. While the scholarship is powerful, it is not lost through obfuscation. (7) Or, who can ever forget the inimitably dense, uncommunicative yet widely hailed brilliance of the former Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talkative but saying nothing notable? Awful stuff. No English fogs from the Channel please, at least not for Tyndale and Cranmer.
But, rather wildly and out-of-the-blue, Prof. Daniell observes that this plain style speech—even in the scientific community—held forth “until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Germanic-American obfuscation took over” (256). No evidence, just the claim. We’ll leave that there.
INFLUENCES ON TYNDALE, 256-258
Thomas More offered the jibe that “all England list now to go to school with Tyndale to learn English” (257). There is truth here for “many erstwhile illiterates did indeed go to school with Tyndale” (257).
For example, William Maldon of Chelmsford (about 40 miles to the NE of London, about 2 o'clock as the crow flies) spoke of the Sunday evening gatherings of poor men gathering to hear the “glad tidings” read. This itself led William himself to learn reading. It led him to buy, read, and treasure the NT. It also led to his father beating him and disputes with his mother about the English Bible. Prof. Daniell will have more to say later about Maldon.
Influences?
West Country speech patterns of Gloucestershire? Prof. Daniell thinks so, but believes more academic work is needed on a literary level. Numerous words need evaluation.
Prof. Daniell calls attention to William Langland’s Piers Ploughman written in the 1380s and just a few miles north of Tyndale’s birthplace in Gloucestershire. Yet while Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was repeatedly published for courtly reading, Langland languished and was never printed…at least until 1550.
Prof. Daniell continues the discussion under his next rubric.
MAGDALEN COLLEGE VULGARIA, 258-263
Apparently, there was a “war of the grammarians.” Do we teach English grammar in English? In Latin? Do we teach Latin with Latin? If so, how? And who? Or, do we teach Latin using English? Tyndale had been at Magdalen Hall for 10 years while experiments and debates were to be had. Varied teaching books survive. The struggle was to translate “neither too high nor too low” (258).
Whatever the impact, Tyndale had a “registry of phrases just above the level of common speech” (258). This much, he was an exploratory connoisseur of words.
Prof. Daniell registers his familiar theme regarding Tyndale, Coverdale and the progeny of translations: “short, punchy Saxon forms,” clear and powerful verbs, and subject-verb-object forms. While Shakespeare never feared a good Latinized line, he often would alternate with a quick, punchy Saxon line in parallelistic clarification.
QUEEN MARY 1, 263-264
No English Bibles were printed during her reign (1553-1558). No surprises there. That was standard English policy from 1401 until Henry’s Great Bible, some 140 plus years. And even with its publication and distribution of the Great Bible with Cranmer's wonderful Preface, there were reversals, e.g. “pay and obey, but don’t read and think” in a few monumentally absurd proclamations by Henry and Parliament. Now, Cardinal Pole, an Anglo-Italian, had been out of country for 34 years. Mary recalled him. He advocated for the revival of the 1401 Act of De Haeretico Comburendo. Close to 300 were burned at the stake.
John Rogers was her first victim. Rogers was Tyndale’s friend, collaborator, and maker of the Thomas Matthew’s Bible (again, renamed as a theologico-political screen for Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s works and names). These were picked up by Henry as the Great Bible and it was now awash throughout the land. Rogers was burned at Smithfield on 11 FEB 1555. Prof. Daniell offers this quote:
“…with heroic fortitude. Even Catholic [=Anglo-Italians, not Reformed Catholics] opponents said so. The godly who had gathered wept and prayed God to give him courage to bear the pain and not to recant. Rogers’ ashes were collected, a martyr’s relics, and some seeing birds fly over as he expired thought this a sign of the Holy Ghost” (264).
Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer would be caught in the dragoons’ dragnets in the effort to extinguish God’s Gospel. The Anglo-Italian demons were roiling and raging.
800 Reformed Churchmen sailed the Channel to the Continent as fugitives and exiles for the Biblical faith, including some significant Biblical scholars. Mary’s policy did not extinguish the true faith nor did it advance the Anglo-Italian, Imperial or Roman-Vatican cause. The day of the English Bible had arrived and was to stay.
BIBLE READING, 264-268
Prof. Daniell will give portraits.
Richard Tracy, for example, wrote King Henry VIII in 1544. It is entitled A Supplication to our most Sovereign Lord King Henry VIII. He argued that the Romanish conventicles [our word for them] had only been able to stand through the suppression of the vernacular Bibles. While the Great Bible was going into the 9000 national churches, Parliament had passed a proclamation warning that the “lower classes” were not to read the Bible” (264). But, the reality was outstripping Anglo-Italian imperialism. The Bible had seeped into the national life and was being read.
We return to the story of William Maldon of Chelmsford. A.W. Pollard, the Cranmer scholar, tells the story:
“…divers poor men of the town of Chelmsford in the county of Essex where my father dwelt and I born and with him brought up, the said poor men bought the New Testament of Jesus Christ and on Sundays did sit reading in the lower end of the church, and many would flock about them to hear their reading, then I came among the said readers to hear their reading of that glad tidings of the gospel, then my father seeing this that I listened to them every Sunday, then came he and sought me among them, and brought me away from the hearing of them and would have me say the Latin matins with him, the which grieved me very much, and thus did fetch me away divers times, then I see I could not be in rest, then I thought, I will learn to read English, and then I will have the New Testament and read thereon myself, and then I had learned of an English primer as far as patris sapientia and then on Sundays I plied my English primer, the Maytide following I and my father’s apprentice Thomas Jeffary laid our money together, and bought the New Testament in English, and hid it in our bedstraw and so exercised it at convenient times” (265).
A few self-evident observations: (1) The NT had surfaced in a parish 40 miles NE of London. (2) Sunday evenings were the occasion for the readings (following Latin-based services). (3) Apparently, many illiterates were gathered, but one amongst them could read. (4) Maldon was an illiterate, but resolved to learn to read English from a primer. (5) From the story, this was a continuing endeavor on his part. Reformed and Confessional Churchman call it the "due and ordinary means of grace." (6) The father was not pleased. (6) He buys a NT himself and “exercises” himself with/in it. Prof. Daniell refers to fights with his mother and father over it.
Prof. Daniell warms again to his frequent theme: many print-runs of the Tyndale, Coverdale Bibles and NTs for the English public, notwithstanding efforts to roll back the movement.
There is evidence for large assemblies doing this, which is, gathering for Bible reading. Some were so large that even Mary did not disrupt the practice: two notable illustrations come from a large parish in Bristol and one in London. It would appear that reading might occur provided there were no theological statements or reflections contrary to Anglo-Italian theology. But, the cat was out of the bag.
Here is one example of an assembly.
“We begin with prayer; after, read some one or two chapters of the Bible, give the sense thereof, and confer upon the same: that done, we lay aside our books, and after solemn prayer by the first speaker, he propoundeth some text out of the Scripture, and prophesieth [=teacheth, speaketh forth] out of the same by space of one hour or three quarters of an hour. After him standeth up a second speaker… [he is followed similarly by] the third, the fourth, the fifth, etc. as the time will give leave. Then the first speaker concludeth with prayer as he began with prayer, with an exhortation to contribution to the poor, which collection being made, is also concluded with a prayer. This morning exercise beginneth at eight of the clock and continueth until twelve of the clock. The like course and exercise is observed in the afternoon from two of the clock unto five or six of the clock. Last of all the business of the government of our church is handled” (267).
Unfortunately, Prof. Daniell does not date this record. This might be what Elizabeth had in mind regarding “prophesyings,” although the evidence for that appeared to be directed at Presbyters doing similarly. This appears to be a Congregationalist affair.
BIBLE REFERENCES BY INDIVIDUALS, 266-267
The Reformation was an “intellectual event” led by university men from the top of the academic food chain. It drew laymen into its orbit and gave them a new liberty. Many “ordinary people were bewildered…from their normal moorings” (267). But all the Reformers “wanted a nation of Bible readers” and for “all of England to be a university” in which “ploughboys and milkmaids sang the Scripture as they worked” (267). The Reformers did maintain the “authority of the Bible and control of its interpretation never more so than the Geneva Bible” (268), a note revealing Prof. Daniell's Dissenter roots.
Prof. Daniell returns to more illustrations of the commoner and the Bible.
1. Rawlins White of Cardiff, an illiterate fisherman, burned at the stake in 1555. Cardiff is about 150 miles from London and about 9 o'clock as the crow flies. The Bible was in a fisherman's home. He sent his son to school to learn to read English; they were Welsh-speakers. The boy read the English Bible at night. This indicates that the English Bible was to be had far outside London. The man became seriously literate—in terms of the readings—and was able to cite “chapter and leaf” (267).
2. John Maundrel was burned at Salisbury. Salisbury is about 90 miles from London at about 8 o'clock as the crow flies. He was illiterate too. But, he bought and owned a pocket-sized Tyndalian NT. He would ask anyone who could read to read to him. He too learned to cite and quote the Bible.
3. Joan Waste was a blind woman in Derby. Derby is about 130 miles from London at about 11 o'clock as the crow flies. She too bought a NT. She had others read it to her. She had sections memorized. She was burned at the stake in 1558.
4. Mrs. Prest of Exeter. Exeter is this scribe's ancestral home on mother's side. It is about 200 miles at about 8 o'clock as the crow flies. She was illiterate too, but attended readings and learned much by it. She was burned at the stake in Exeter in 1558.
5. A.G. Dickens in his English Reformation gives examples of youths who could read, did read, and were put to the stake.
Prof. Daniell again repeats his oft-made statement. Between 1536 (when Tyndale was strangled and roasted in Belgium) and 1549 (when the English Book of Common Prayer and English Bible were required in 9000 churches) was a meagre 13-14 years.
Despite the Anglo-Italian reversals of the 1540s, new forces were at work. Cranmer began studying liturgical example as his library at Lambeth reveals. He was absorbing Continental developments and scholarship. He chaired meetings at Windsor and Chertsey to review “phrasing and many other collects” (274).
To close off the chapter, Prof. Daniell offers two Cranmerian collects to show the force of the Saxon effort, the clear and direct language for use in national prayers:
1. The 21st Sunday After Trinity
“Grant we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people, pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind: through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
We would offer that Prayer Book doctrine and piety makes no room for the rampant noises of modern charismania or the free-wingers in worship. People kneel and beseech the divine mercies.
2. The 4th Sunday after Easter drawn from the 4th century Gelasian Sacramentary
“O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they many love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise: that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found: through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
There are reasons to be a Reformed Prayer Book Churchman.
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